WASHINGTON. U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 in Alaska to discuss a potential peace deal aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. The announcement came as Trump said negotiations involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were close to reaching a ceasefire agreement that could require Ukraine to surrender significant territory.
Speaking to reporters at the White House earlier in the day, Trump suggested the agreement might involve a land exchange. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” he said.
The Kremlin confirmed the summit, with Putin aide Yuri Ushakov stating that the talks will focus on options for achieving a long-term resolution to the conflict. “This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically,” Ushakov said.
In his national address, Zelenskiy said a ceasefire was possible if sufficient pressure was applied to Russia. He noted that his team was in constant contact with the United States and had engaged with more than a dozen world leaders on the matter.
Putin claims Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, along with Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, though Russian forces do not fully control all the disputed areas. Bloomberg News earlier reported that U.S. and Russian officials were discussing a deal that would formalize Moscow’s occupation of seized territories, but a White House official dismissed the report as speculation.
While Ukraine has expressed flexibility in ending the conflict, ceding around a fifth of its territory remains politically difficult for Kyiv. Former U.S. State Department official Tyson Barker warned that such a proposal would likely be rejected by Ukraine.
Trump, who has alternated between praise and criticism of Putin since returning to the White House, has recently threatened new sanctions and tariffs on Russia and its trade partners unless Moscow halts its offensive. It remains unclear whether those measures will take effect.
This will be the first high-level diplomatic event in Alaska since March 2021, when U.S. and Chinese officials held contentious talks in Anchorage.
Edgardo Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
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